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Andrea G.'s picture

The analogy to language, and morality in the brain

Submitted by Andrea G. on Sun, 04/13/2008 - 8:16am.
One of the topics that interested me the most in our discussion this week was the comparison of morality to language, and the assumption of the existence of some sort of universal grammar for both.  I've been thinking a lot about it in the context of what happens when this "innate faculty" (as we talked about it in linguistics) is damaged or doesn't develop properly.  With language, there are a number of aphasias that result in an impairment of language.  One of the most interesting of these, I think, is Specific Language Impairment (SLI), which seems to have a very strong genetic component.  The disorder is grammatical in nature, but the specific impairment varies from person to person (although it's generally the same within families).  Similarly, brain damage can often result in an acquired aphasia of some sort.  If we see language disorders universally, it seems reasonable that there might be parallel impairments in morality, if indeed there is some sort of universal morality.

Assuming that this comparison can be made, it seems that psychopathy might be good example of an impairment of morality from birth, while patients with damage to the frontal cortex could be a good example of acquired impairments in morality.  Psychopaths, who have no noticeable brain damage, show less activity in emotion-related areas of the brain when responding to emotional words than do controls.  Other studies have shown abnormal fear conditioning and fear-potentiated startle reflexes in psychopaths.  While I'm not aware of any studies that have looked into the heritability of psychopathy, if we continue the analogy between language and morality, it's likely that there is a strong genetic factor involved.  There have been numerous studies with ventromedial frontal cortex-damaged patients that have showed reduced skin conductance response and have performed poorly during the Iowa Gambling Task, the measure used most often in these studies.  Control subjects have an increased skin conductance response before they choose from the "bad deck" in this task, even before they know consciously that it is the wrong deck to choose from.  It's been argued that this anticipatory response is vital in making good decisions, something these patients often have difficulty with.

I haven't come to any conclusions about this analogy to language and whether it means anything with regard to the existence of a "universal grammar" of morality.  I just think it's an interesting idea to put out there, since we focused mostly on positive examples in class.  It seems like the discovery of the function of a lot of brain regions has come from looking at what happens when that area is damaged, so these patients seem like a good place to start in looking for morality in the brain.  I'd be interested to hear what everyone else thinks about this.

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